La vacanza degli intellettuali. Pasolini, Moravia e il Circolo di Sabaudia

‘I chose Sabaudia as a spiritual retreat for my enforced rest and my anxieties about future work, the furious dreams that keep me anchored to the world.’ With these words, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the documentary La forma della città (The Shape of the City), described his relationship with Sabaudia, where he had bought a house with Alberto Moravia. A square building on the seafront, a few kilometres from the rationalist city built by Mussolini as part of his project to reclaim the Pontine Marshes. That place, once a symbol of the regime’s enterprise, became a few years later the favourite haunt of the Italian intelligentsia: here you could meet Moravia shopping at the fish market, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ian McEwan discussing the script of a film that was never made, Laura Betti walking with Dario Bellezza and Renzo Paris, and Jean Genet hunting for signatures on a petition for Palestine… But it was not only intellectuals who chose these places for their holidays. Soon the coast became a holiday destination for the Roman bourgeoisie: Sabaudia and Circeo appeared in the society pages of gossip magazines but, above all, they became the dark theatre of one of the most heinous crimes of the second half of the 20th century, destined to remain etched in the country’s conscience. Paolo Massari has a privileged point of view in this story: his great-uncle was the founder of the city’s library, he met the protagonists of this story and conversed with them under the porticoes of the Bar Italia. Guided by archival documents and novels, and aided by the words of illustrious witnesses such as Dacia Maraini, Alain Elkann and Edoardo Albinati, Massari reconstructs the moment when Sabaudia became one of the avant-garde centres of Italian art, cinema and literature, a Platonic school and a literary circle: the focal point from which to observe the cultural history of the post-war period.